TBF, Mags, you have been doing a lot of the heavylifting for the quest, so this will be in good hands.
To be clear to everyone, this is just me burning out on imagination of the quest, since my muse has been hitting me over the head a lot with so many different ideas that I just can't find myself too interested in this.
I'll still hang out here, though, since this still does have a sepcial place in my heart.
I'd like to thank you all for making this a wonderful experience while it lasted.
I'd also like to thank @Magoose, @Fluffy_serpent, and @Martin Noctis for doing so much to help prepare and write this quest. I couldn't have done it without you all.
I mean...I wouldn't really classify that as luck as it's pretty clear as preparation. Philip laid the foundations that Alexander would then utilize. Luck isn't really a factor in that, strictly speaking.
It's less that Alan got shafted, it's more the fact he has to wrangle greedy assholes who think he's going to insane for making movies and money, and not realizing that he's the one risking everything, not them, and its trying to rearange deck chairs on the titanic.
They all think its going to sink and they want to save themselves, while Alan himself is the only one holding out any hope.
Plus most of the board hate Kathleen for the simple fact that she, not any one of them, got Bruce O'Brian to do a movie with them.
Sorry, I guess the main reason I'm so invested in Alan is because of the unjust way he was sacked in the OTL. The board literally wanted to hire back a dude who'd stole 60k from them and Alan didn't wanna do that for moral reasons. Him buying up DC and it being his last big shot tonsave his ass was so dang enthralling to me.
I know... The Loony Toons will get more cartoons then canon, and won't be abandoned by Warner because their CEO is a fucking asshole who hates cartoons.
I mean, the same thing could be said about Michael Eisner being a greedy jerk and his later years at Disney being a trainwreck, yet we hired him all the same. I feel like you're letting your feelings for OTL Kathleen affect your views on Quest! Kathleen here. It's not unjustified, but I think you're not giving Quest! Kathleen a fair shake.
We have to create a new companytradition... Once we got our hands in one of those terrible Chinese/Soviet Rip offs of Lucasfilms movies, we rent a cinema, and go to watch it with friends, family, the crew of the film, and anyone who wants to go from Lucasfilms... Just to have a good laugh all together.
Ali turned to the phone on the wall there was a decision here of who to call. Ali picked up the Phone and herd it ring. Before the man on the other end could speak Ali begin with a hard statement . "You was right…"
[]Being Better (Ali retires with some dignity.)
[]Bruce Does Good (Unkown effect)
[]Meanwhile (A random roll will be done for a random person, and their fate will be changed too)
...Why must you hurt me so...I may have my sympathies for the Kennedy, but no way in hell do I want her near Lucasfilms! We must not take that chance with this new and improved timeline.
Yes, a good list of movies that all had good directors, good staff and good writers...all of those things she's not. The moment she tries on her own she flops, and I'm not going to take a chance on the destroyer of Lucasfilms now that we're actually on a good direction in this quest.
..Fine. I can be nice. I can try to put my feelings for that lying, narcisistic, two bit bitch that ruined the best franchises the world has ever seen.
I'll try to give this Quest version the benefit of the doubt.
But the moment she makes a single move towards taking any sort of ownership towards Lucasfilms...
Well to play Devil's advocate for Kathleen, this is a 25 year old Kathleen Kennedy who at this point for all intents and purposes is a completely different person to 2015 Kathleen. People can change a lot in 37 years and since Kathleen isn't a well documented or biographed individual, we have no idea what turned her into the woman she is today besides some feelings of resentment towards the Hollywood industry and wanting to get creative control. She literally just started her career in Hollywood after a small stint in the San Diego news, she's as much of a clean slate as you can get. She's only got one film under her belt, and is scared, anxious and unsure after facing so much pressure and harassment with Bruce being the only kind face so far and not expecting anything.
It can be debated to what extent Kathleen was responsible for the success of movies under her producer credit. Her tenure as President of Lucasfilms leads one to believe that she is bad, but there are some gems like Andor and Mandalorian which managed to get made under her watch. If she had no talent or redeeming qualities throughout her career, Steve and so many high profile Directors would never work with her. Personally I like to believe that her talent is just being really damn good at logistics and finance as her roster til the Sequels mainly consisted of passion projects and films with heavy creative input from collaborating producers and directors, and writers. In regards to her leadership, while some eggregious mistakes clearly are her fault like the failure of Dial of Destiny and the shitshow of Disney Canon and getting rid of the EU, some factors were beyond her control like how the Sequels were sabotaged by JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson acting like manchildren and waging a dick contest with each movie, along with JJ having no creativity and copying George and Rian being spiteful and obsessed with subverting expectations.
I think in spite of her many flaws and bad leadership, Kathleen would not be as hated if she had good marketing and public relations. She would just be another faceless blob who people would hate for their leadership, but only at a surface level and not too personal if she just shut up about Star Wars politics and trying to start feuds with the fans, doubling down on bad decisions. Compare Kathleen to Todd Howard who most of the gaming community express a profound hatred towards and is seen as a joke, and yet he has an insanely large and dedicated following, continues to rank in profits for Bethesda and whenever some new flashy game pops up, everyone forgives Todd's sins and gets hyped. This is because Todd has nat 20 in charisma, doesn't try to start wars with the fandom, sweeps past mistakes under the rug so he won't be remembered for them, and has a certain charm and air of a relatable nerd and scrappy underdog in spite of being head of one of gaming's biggest companies. Todd Howard is the master of Spin and if Kathleen had the same charisma and leaned in on her past achievements instead of hating on them then she'd have a lot of fans.
Also in regards of whether or not Kathleen deserves redemption, it should be pointed out that for everything wrong with her, she is fundamentally not a bad person. Horrible leader, businesswoman and artist to be sure, but morally Kathleen is far and beyond Hollywood's worst and has nowhere near the sins committed by most Producers in town, Harvey Weinstein being a major point. Want to know someone who we've already worked with who is a horrible person? Jackie Chan. The dude is a proud card-carrying member of the Chinese Communist Party and is a awful father to his children in every way possible, but we still bonded with him for Conan. I don't like modern Jackie, but I'm open to working with him in the future because Jackie Chan wasn't awful until the 2010's and Bruce through collaborations has the chance to change him for the better. We've done this lots of times before by giving Corpo Mike a heart, making Alan Ada less of an ass, helping George to be a good husband, saving John Travolta from Scientology, helping Debbie be a good mother and more.
Finally, while I'm not exactly jumping to get Kathleen on board with Lucasfilms, if hypothetically she does join the company, she is not going to have anywhere near as much power here, even if she has a ton of producer successes and does amazing networking. Lucasfilms unlike OTL is a private company run by the Lucas and O'Brian families, the only exception being Mike with his 2%. So long as Lucasfilms doesn't face financial ruin, it will remain private and thus the ultimate power lies with us and George, and it's an open secret that George is not a fan of the route Disney Star Wars has taken and likely would have put his foot down if he wasn't retired. The future of Lucasfilms is not Kathleen, it's George III and Mary if they decide to follow their fathers, doubly so if they get married to each other. The same goes for Billie and any of Bruce and Carrie's other children who want to make films. So long as we mentor them well and be good parents, we'll pass on the torch safely. And if all of this hasn't convinced you Overmind, Kathleen Kennedy is a year and a half older than us. She will almost always have Bruce as her boss and when Bruce retires she'll likely do the same, if not within a few years. Plus even if Bruce and George retire at 65, I don't think they'll be quite as silent as George OTL and will step in if the company is going in a wrong direction.
Yeah Corporations are assholes, and water is wet. What amazes me most about the scandal is that they fired Alan to protect a random middle-level executive who stole $61,000. Imagine for comparison if some guy at Disney who was in charge of marketing for Latin America embezzled half a million dollars, Bob Iger fired him for it and then got sacked by the board. Who the hell was this guy?
Hey I know, we should fund and produce a Batgirl film, do months of shooting and have everything nearly done, then just say fuck it and make it a tax write off.
I'm completely down for a Batgirl film starring Jodie Foster, definitely deserves a starring film. Though I guess with that you have to wonder what is going to happen to justify Bruce not being in the lead. Justice League shenanigans?
Honestly, I don't get why people keep complaining about that. Damn near everyone involved with the project has said that the film was damn near unwatchable. The only benefit I see it would have had would be the YouTube videos that would have followed to dunk on the film.
I mean this is coming from the same company who hyped up the boring and bland Black Adam as the foundation of the new DC and spent millions keeping Ezra "Psycho" Miller out of jail and hailing him as a great actor while bribing reviewers to say that the Flash was a masterpiece. Maybe Batgirl could have been the worst superhero movie ever made, but I won't make any guarantees unless I see the film for myself.
As for becoming friends with Bruce I think that it is unlikely. Ali seemed to get on well with Joe Frazier but was apparently never able to bring himself to Apologize to the mans face. He also seemed to Flip flop on the apology based on what was best for his image. Now I might be Biased in my assessment as I have already revealed myself as coming down on Frazier side of the argument but I don't think Ali would give the kind of Sincere Apology that Bruce would need before Bruce would befriend the man.
True, but I don't think it's too unlikely. He did become friends with George Foreman for the rest of his life after the Rumble in the Jungle where they hated each other's guts. Considering Bruce won and he isn't heavily injured, I don't think he's got much hate for Ali and would be open to a friendly hand. Nothing close, but decent acquaintances.
[]Being Better (Ali retires with some dignity.)
[]Bruce Does Good (Unkown effect)
[]Meanwhile (A random roll will be done for a random person, and their fate will be changed too)
Edited to Good Judgment
[]Being Better (Ali retires with some dignity.)
He is going to have some issues with Parkensons. The Medical consensus seems to be he needed to stop in 75 after fighting with George Foreman to only have mild symptoms but by stopping now there is a good chance that it doent get as bad as it did OTL
Bruce Gets Reincarnated as Jaune Arc and falls back into old habits.
You should have dyed your hair black to make things a little bit less jarring when you looked in the mirror. The face of a young man who was not your own was just too disorienting. The Blue eyes were too striking. Too full of a life that he had seemingly stolen away. It honestly disturbed you so much that you thought that this was God's way of punishing you for your hubris… your rage and your wroth.
He had stolen you away from your life, from your love and daughter… for all the things you loved, with a fucking Truck.
But you shut the cabinet mirror. The id, the name you had, was a young teenager named Jaune Arc… and it was one of the first things that you went to change once you finally realized that this was not a dream and that your death was also a strange rebirth. You were smart, and the context clues of a different world were apparent once you stopped panicking like a crazy person, and thought rationally.
Mother always said you were a genius and in the weeks that you were here, it took you only a few weeks to realize that… Remanent was in need of some culture. This place was a dead world where creatures of darkness were trying to eat them and destroy everything they built, where people could only live in relative safety in only four locations…
And it meant all your knowledge, books, remembrance, and of course, movies were all ripe for the taking to profit on. At least until you could discover a way to return to your body, or to earth…
It was really feeling like that old story that Tomino told you about, or some of the Howard stories, Where some stranger traveled to a strange world and they must survive and thrive.
So you were moving towards the survival thing, by using your God-given talents to make a splash.
Art was always needed to give survival meaning, and everyone liked stories.
-------------------
The library was filled with eyes that were staring as you finished penning the Star Wars novel. You knew Geroge wouldn't mind, considering you helped make the damn film, and that this novel would be different enough, given that it was told from the perspective of Han, and only Han. it was a fascinating study of Han's character, and how he changed, if you said so yourself.
But most people didn't seem to realize that you had hundreds of pages in order. Paper.
You knew about the computing systems that they had, but you were not stupid, you just wanted to see the pages fill themselves with words and character, and each one was as brilliant as the last until they were a cohesive and brilliant whole. In your mind anyway…
You wondered just how the hell George, Carrie and the others could have done something like this in a few days, let alone a single day in Carrie's case. This was exhausting and took all your mental energies.
Then you saw a young woman with black hair look at you, with a bow on her head that was not just there to give her a cute look. Her amber eyes looked cat-like and you felt uneasy. "What are you writing?"
She had been watching you for a week, as words flowed from pen, and pencil onto the paper, and it was something that you honestly didn't really notice or care about too much. You were so focused, that the glance was not enough. You looked up at the woman and frowned. "A story that a friend told me." You replied.
You saw the ribbon on her back, and a… pistol handle on her side. "Must have been some story." She said, looking at the pages that you carefully maintained in order.
"His life's work… it would be a shame to not let it be told." You replied.
"Is he-" She started to ask the question. But you stopped her.
"No… just very far away."
The girl did not seem to like that answer. "What does that mean?"
"Exactly what it means." You replied. "Now, why are you watching me write?"
"Oh, it's just strange to see someone use so much paper when a Scroll would be useful." Ah yes the wonder of technology, how you loathed it. It hurt your eyes, and was not big enough to help you type… and you hated typing.
"I'm old fashioned." You replied. You then reached for your bag, and carefully placed the story into place, to not lose or crumple any of it. "And it helps me remember someone I-"
Loved was the word that died in your throat. How much you missed Carrie… and how you wanted to hold her in your arms. The girl nodded. "I understand."
You put the bag over your shoulder and sighed. "Bruce O'Brian."
"Blake Belladonna." She replied before she raised an eyebrow. "That's a strange name."
"Well, I'm a strange person." You replied.
----------------------------------------------
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! THE FINAL ROUND OF THE VALE LEUGE OPEN TORNAMENT IS FINALLY HERE! WILL THE EMERALD SPLASH FINALLY TAKE HOME GOLD FROM OUR FAN FAVORITE, SUNNY DRAGON AFTER 15 GRUELING ROUNDS? OR WILL SUNNY MAINTAIN HER TITLE AS THE STRONGEST YOUTH FIGHTER IN VALE?
You spat out blood as you looked at the ice being put down on your eye. "Shit." You swore as you tried to see through the blood in your eye. That girl was tough.
And she was enjoying every moment of you punching the hell out of her as if she was getting stronger every time you hit her.
"Come on Bruce, one more round, and we'll have her by decision." Your cut man was pointing out the obvious. "Just avoid her, and then you can-"
When you had learned that fighting was co-ed, you had, under a very strange mindset, thought that it would be based on weight division, and you would fight people that would be near your size and weight.
You did not expect it to be based on a first come first serve basis, on an open invitational. And that this blonde bombshell was going 15 rounds with you, and enjoying every minute of it after you mopped the floor with over 10 people. "She's going for the knockout, I can't avoid her!" You proclaimed before you saw the bell getting ready to be rung.
Fuck it, you had to pull Ali on this shit. Though you had to avoid her kicks on your knees.
But you had one thing she didn't have, you could see it. She was acting like she already won, taking her time and making some faces to you.
You had something most people failed to see from you. A lot more spite and grit.
And a killer right hand.
The bell rang and you rose, moving across the ring and started unleashing a fury of blows to keep her on edge. You needed to make her try to do something stupid. And the best way you could do that was through something simple. Get her angry.
And it was working.
"Come on Yang, finish it!" A voice shouted from the crowd, and you swore you saw fire unleash from her hair.
But then you saw everything from your good eye.
Left, right, left, the low kick was to unbalance you. But you managed to avoid them all.
One, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty, every blow that came towards you was dodged, was avoided as you moved back, and forth, bobbing and weaving, and you managed to avoid every single attack until the bell rang. The girl was punched drunk, she couldn't stop, and you did what you could, slipped under, and brought her down to the canvas with a leg sweep.
"AND THE EMERALD SPLASH WINS!" The Announcer said.
The victory was yours yet again. Hopefully, someone would realize that you were a good actor two. eh, you'll see.
AN: I am never doing something like this again, I have wasted a whole night writing this when I could have gotten an update.
I'm not saying that we have to go with Kathleen, I just wanted to provide an alternate viewpoint to show how her joining wouldn't be the absolute worst thing for the Quest. For now all I just want to do is make sure she isn't deprived of proper credit for Superman. If she continues to remain with Columbia then that's fine with me.
Yeah to be honest, I don't see a reason why this had to be made off of a RealOtto shitpost of all things and I hate it. For me, SIs and Isekais work best if we got a blank slate whose second life is the life the audience connects with and their first life is blank or was bad enough that being Isekaid is relatively a good thing. One major exception is Ascendance with a Bookworm whose protagonist had a decent first life but neglected her family due to her obsession with books, and when remembering this she is sad of what she wasted and resolves to be better for her second family and loved ones.
The existence of this is just way too meanspirited. We've gotten really attatched to Bruce's life and story for more than a year and to rip him away in his prime so he can live a second life in a mediocre anime just makes me feel awful, especially how it basically is a slap in the face to Bruce's entire faith and would really devastate everyone he loves and probably make this world a worse place than what it was headed.
Read my above post, I will never continue something that I don't regard as existing. Plus I just hate all Juane Arc fics by nature. The only fanfic starring him I ever liked was a really early RWBY fic where he co-parented an orphan squirrel faunus girl with Blake. I also stopped liking RWBY years ago.
With their recent track record I couldn't blame you,
However, after reading tons of fanfics from different fandoms..you just usually return to RWBY for a bit since there is nothing left (I'd rather read RWBY ones than Naruto ones..At least RWBY fanfic writers actually put in effort when they do so..
Naruto ones? They have a similar issue to Worm..the Sociopath "Greater Good" with not focus towards actually helping people with emphasis on "Realism" are the only stories as far as I can see (I checked the Naruto fanfics earlier..and it's still the same as when I last read it some years ago.)
But enough that,
If you were a producer/writer, how would you change RWBY? (Like you can change everything from plot to minor details)..gonna guess your first act is to remove the "Rule of Cool" from the story.
Then I'll leave the thread if that's what you ask,
Not out of spite, but simply because if I were to continue, the Rewards' removal may have unintended consequences on Bruce's Past, Present, and Future.
Then I'll leave the thread if that's what you ask,
Not out of spite, but simply because if I were to continue, the Rewards' removal may have unintended consequences on Bruce's Past, Present, and Future.
Dodes'ka-den was a rather interesting case of distribution. This time it was not you or Mike who made the call to distribute it, but George. Apparently he had become penpals with Akira since the release of Seven Samurai, usually exchanging one or two letters a month between each other. On one of his more recent letters, Akira informed George of Dodes'ka-den, his Icarus film as it were. In many ways it was a dark inverse of what you and George had done with Star Wars. In a time where Japanese cinema had been unkind to him, Akira had bravely ventured on his own to make great art, founding his own production company and funding Dodes'ka entirely out of his own money in one great gamble to prove he still had it and make a film his way. Only Dodes'ka-den didn't make a billion dollars and be hailed as the greatest movie of all time, it was a critical and commercial failure, drove Akira to heavy debt and apparently deep depression and near suicide.
Perhaps George saw this as a case of what could have happened if American Graffiti was shutdown, if Star Wars was a bomb, if he didn't have you. George wanted to help his friend get the release he deserved just as you did for George with THX, and he was adamant that it get a summer distribution, even if it was to be paired with Godzilla.
Mike didn't like this one bit. He heard horror stories from Toho of just how bad Dodes'ka-den was and tried to persuade George otherwise, just wanting to focus on Godzilla and maybe distribute that last Lone Wolf and Cub. George was adamant that Akira Kurosawa's ill-treated child get an American welcome, Marcia was 100% on board, and you fell in out of your friendship with George. Mike, knowing this wasn't a battle worth fighting, agreed and did his best to market the film, leaning heavily on Akira Kurosawa's developing reputation stateside as Japan's George Lucas.
You had two expectations about this film. Either it was going to be as garbage as Japan made it out to be, or another Kurosawa Classic. Somehow...it was both?
The plot was a huge departure from Akira's Samurai films and you had to wonder if he was really passionate about the subject or just wanted to pivot as far away from his Toshiro Mifune collaborations as possible. There really wasn't any structure or a traditional plot to the film, not even a real beginning, middle, end. It was an anthology of people living in squalor in a Japanese slum. Almost none of them were connected to each other, and the only character who could be called a protagonist was some mentally ill boy who pretended he was a trolley conductor at the beginning and end, the final scene showing the boy in one of his delusions running the trolley with all of the characters hopping on board.
Besides that, the story was just a series of anecdotes of really miserable people living in poverty and just going through awful stuff. A dude works himself to near death to support a large family with all of his "Children" being spawn of other men who his wife cheated with. A dude disarms a violent youth and then just lets himself get robbed. Two drunk assholes just swap wives for a day and that's it. A girl is raped by her uncle, becomes pregnant and then stabs a boy with the uncle facing no consequences. It's just a myriad of misery and the worst human experiences.
Honestly there's lots of potential for this to be a great film as the soundtrack was stellar as usual, the cinematography done in its usual painting like capture, the actors are all try their best and have some talent. It's just that it's all done in vain with a garbage script. Maybe if the stories were connected and some kind of theme was shared like how poverty is bad or man can find love and support from the community then it would be good. But there was none of that, it was just an anthology of people living awful lives and that's it, like the first half of Clockwork Orange with less violence.
It honestly boggles your mind that you somehow got 40 million in ticket sales from...this. If you had to take a guess, people were interested because Kurosawa had a reputation of being a cinematic genius and they loved his previous Samurai films so this HAD to be good. Only the near unanimous consensus for this film was that it was a depressing and miserable experience, if not one of the worst films they ever saw.
Then in an ironic twist of fate, Dodes'ka-den's performance was saved by "The Critics getting it wrong". Just as they had with all Kurosawa movies previously, the critics gave high praise to the movie as a pillar of cinematic greatness, a hallmark of the urban drama in a time where Hollywood seemed to be giving it the fate of the Western. They saw the story not as depressing, but as a gripping insight of the human condition and intelligent commentary on poverty and urban decay. At this point you genuinely wanted to see Kurosawa make a paint drying movie and see how the critics react because you were convinced that they worshipped the man as a the Da Vinci of cinema. It was a deserved reputation to be sure, but in this case in spite of its good qualities, not so much.
You really just wanted to purge this out of your mind and move on, but a couple of weeks after release while in the office to see George and his writer, you got a surprising phone call directly from Akira Kurosawa himself. Through Toho International contacts, he had become aware of Dodes'ka-den's performance in America. While he was disheartened that audiences both foreign and domestic were never going to like the film, he was at the very least happy that American critics saw its "beauty" and there were some fans of his work. More than that, he was really grateful to George and Lucasfilms for giving him a genuine shot when Toho just wanted to pretend that the movie never existed, it really touched his heart to know that he had such friends in America, and hearing that you couldn't help but shed a tear, as despite the movie being a mess, Akira definitely deserved it.
There was also a nice happy ending monetarily. Because Akira funded the movie out of his own pockets, he would receive 25% of all gross in America. That meant he got $10 million in a couple of months for a movie he made eight years ago. With this he was able to wipe away all of his debts, treat his family well, and be in a position where he could retire today and live the rest of his life in comfort. He wasn't ready to retire just yet, but there was no longer the burden of being at Toho's beck and call and he could return to making films as he wished, even self-fund an entire movie if he felt like it and not be in danger of monetary collapse. You had no idea what the future was for Akira Kurosawa, but he did promise that he was working hard on the script of that Japanese Shakespeare and looking forward to working on it with Lucasfilms as a collaboration.
So overall Dodes'ka-den was a release that failed successfully, or was a successful failure. With the public backlash and apathy to this and Mechagodzilla respectively, perhaps it was a sign that Japanese imports were becoming normalized or you had to be far more strategic about them. You think Japan still has a lot of great stuff to show, but it would be for the best if Lucasfilms picked up production.
Although...Tomino has been rather insistent that anime films be given a shot. Maybe that was a new market?
